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” It would be helpful to let go of the “materialist” tag. It’s just a distraction. Concentrate on the observable evidence and forget the tag.” Amen. Tagging and name calling is just a cheap rhetorical trick.

What a eloquent, and fact-based, comment. Careful the philosophical types are after us brain folks. They LOVE word play using name calling and HATE talking about data and facts.

Neurobiology believes the brain to actually be the mind on the basis of lots of very hard and very solid evidence.

It would be helpful to let go of the “materialist” tag. It’s just a distraction. Concentrate on the observable evidence and forget the tag.

Strip away the brain neurone by neurone and you gradually strip away all the brain’s functionality. In the process you strip away mind. Conscious awareness comes and goes according to the functioning of the brain. The content of mind is determined by processes beyond conscious awareness. Conscious awareness arises from non-conscious brain processes and is itself brain activity. How all this works is still a deep mystery, but that is the nature of the mystery. We don’t need to pile metaphysical mystery on top of the physical. Not yet. We have a hell of a long way to go getting to grips with the neurophysics. Metaphysics comes cheap and easy. Science not.

Suppose mind is not the brain. How would we even begin to unravel its working? And why does it look so like it is just the brain? If the mind is the brain – as it appears to be – we can hope that we may be able to explain it one day. Otherwise, there would seem to be little hope of ever understanding this essential and most profound aspect of ourselves.

I was drawn into using the term as I was interested in knowing if you could give an example of a non-materialist explanation of a mystery. I wondered what a non-materialist explanation would look like. And what sort of mystery would be explained. You might have talked about the mystery of “love”; or the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. I would have liked to hear you explain those mysteries to our mutual and unqualifed satisfaction, without the aid of science. Science does have something to say on those things, I think. But in any case I don’t think that those mysteries can be explained by other means.

It appears that you cannot give an example. This doesn’t surprise me because non-scientific explanations of mysteries have no way of being shown to be wrong! Any non-scientific explanation of any mystery is as good as any other. One can believe anything one wishes to believe if one is determined enough. In science one cannot do that. That is its great beauty and power.

Any mystery which you might have given, and any non-scientific explanation of it, I have no doubt, would have raised questions which you would have had no way of satisfactorily answering. Certainly no more satisfactorily than science. Those who are forever pointing to the fallibility of science are forever and far away more fallible in their epistemological methodologies.

Not that scientific explanations are exhaustive and fixed in stone for all eternity. The cutting edge of any scientific discipline is always at the rock face of the unknown. Chipping away question by question; perhaps for ever.

The rest is wishful thinking or at best is hopelessly personal and incapable of being shared.

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Self evidently, we don’t know how it would be possible. But I don’t think it’s something that we can rule out a priori.

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In order to detect selection, geneticists look at a forest of mutations like SNPs and microsatellite repeats that serve as a background for identifying unusual “trees.”

The SNPs and other markers are nearly neutral alleles that are segregating in the population by random genetic drift. They vastly outnumber the alleles that are being selected. That’s why the experiment works.

because some molecular biologists miss the forest for the trees, literally

Ichthyic, do you stand by your criticism of what I said?

you’re wrong about this one Larry.

One of us is wrong.